Between November 2009 and January 2011, Slovakian photographer Martin Kollar spent extended periods of time working and living in Israel, building a photographic dossier on one of the most contentious geographical zones of modern history. Kollar's past, a childhood spent behind the Iron Curtain, echoed unexpectedly during his time in Israel. The delineated territories of today's Israel mirror the partition walls of Communist Czechoslovakia during 'normalisation'. Random police searches and detentions piqued Kollar's sense of constantly being under surveillance and the subject of suspicion. Field Trip establishes an opaque representation of the life and landscape of Israel. Military presence looms heavily and the images are punctuated with anxiety. Butchered animals combine with uncertain portraits of Israeli residents and leave the viewer unclear where the military landscape ends and the civilian land begins. The work in Field Trip is just that - the result of a trip, an investigative and inquisitive one, tinged with paranoia, the result being a beautiful, stark, often humorous and complex photographic diary of a well-trodden land. This traumatic album epitomizes frontline photography. Martin Kollar was born in Zilina, Czechoslovakia (now Slovak Republic). He studied at the Academy of Performing Arts Bratislava and has been working as a freelance photographer and cinematographer since he graduated. He has received several grants and awards, including the Fuji Film Euro Press Photo Award and the Backlight Photography Award in Finland. His work has been exhibited across the world, including Maison Europeen de la Photography Paris, France, Rencontres d' Arles in France, MOCA Shanghai China, Guandong Museum of Art in China and Month of Photography in Krakow. He has published two photography books, Nothing Special (2008) and Cahier (2011).

Field Trip

KOLLAR, Martin

MACK BOOKS

Brenner, Ewald, Kollar, Koudelka, Lee, Peress, Sheikh, Shore, Solomon, Struth, Wall, Waplington This Place This Place explores the complexity of Israel and the West Bank, as place and metaphor, through the eyes of twelve internationally acclaimed photographers, each of whom use photography to ask essential questions about culture, society and the inner lives of individuals. The photographers, all outsiders to Israeli and Palestinian society, represent an array of nationalities, cultures, and visual grammars; they are Frédéric Brenner, Wendy Ewald, Martin Kollar, Josef Koudelka, Jungjin Lee, Gilles Peress, Fazal Sheikh, Stephen Shore, Rosalind Solomon, Thomas Struth, Jeff Wall, and Nick Waplington As each artist pursues their own line of investigation, what emerges is a dissonant and startling portrait; together, the highly individualised works combine to create not a single, monolithic vision, but rather a diverse and fragmented portrait, alive to all the rifts and paradoxes of this important and much contested space. This book accompanies a monumental exhibition, curated by Charlotte Cotton, which features more than 600 images, all newly-commissioned work, the product of four years of artist residencies. It includes an essay by the curator and extensive interviews with each of the participating artists. To accompany a touring exhibition: 24 October 2014 - 2 March 2015: DOX: Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague 14 May - 6 September 2015: Tel Aviv Museum of Art 15 October 2015 - 15 January 2016: Norton Museum of Art, Florida

This Place

COTTON, Charlotte, Shela Sheikh, Josef Koudelka, Gilles Peress, Fazal Sheikh, Stephen Shore, et al

The Voyage of Discovery

Steinbrunn, Carly

Nigel Shafran's new book takes five interconnected series of photographs and weaves them together with the common thread of domestic scenes. There is a constant sense of forward movement that is sometimes overt, as in the photographs of supermarket checkouts or underground escalators; sometimes implicit and more emotionally charged, as when the photographer faces the inventory of possessions in his mother's last house. But in each case these photographs deal as much with what has been left behind as with what lies ahead. They carry the inevitability of change and the psychological undertow of time passing moving forward.

Dark Rooms

Shafran, Nigel

Transparency is the new mystery

Mayumi Hosokura

Winner of the 2016 Prix Elysée, Martin Kollar's new work, Provisional Arrangement, considers that which is temporary in a world made up of provisional situations and solutions. "We are tenants of culture", wrote Nicolas Bourriaud, foreseeing a world of precarious inhabitation of ideas. "I grew up in Czechoslovakia during the Communist era," says Kollar, "and with the motto, with the Soviet Union for all Eternity - which has been one of my few experiences with eternity... People of my generation fight against the void left behind the abandoned dogmas." It is this world that Kollar turns to, one of aborted eternities and slackened certainties - to situations which reveal the disintegra-tion of permanences, capturing their fall into the provisional.

Provisional Arrangement

This compendium of images is inspired by the dual principle of common good and necessary evil. Canadian photographer Guillaume Simoneau explores a place far removed from our everyday vanities: the Experimental Lakes Area in the sparsely populated region of northwestern Ontario. But rather than a book about the 58 pristine lakes that comprise this world-renowned natural laboratory, Simoneau’s allusive photographs use the freshwater site as a means to look outwards, to consider a world beyond our own reflections. Unhinged from the moorings of narrative readings, the sequence of images floats between botanic life – aquatic and terrestrial – and hand-made apparatus used by an influential community of international scientists based in the area. The findings of their research into human impacts on entire ecosystems have significantly influenced the decisions of governments and industries. By testing, for example, the effects in the lakes of new chemical substances, they have been able

Experimental Lake

Simoneau, Guillaume

Brand new and shrink-wrapped. Publisher's stock. Girl Plays with Snake by Clare Strand comprises images sourced from the darkest recesses of the artist's extensive archive. The project continues Strand's decades-long engagement with the scrapbooks, magazines and photographs that she has drawn together since her mid-teens. In this iteration of Strand's ongoing research and reflection, women and girls are pictured holding, playing with and gazing fondly at snakes. Key to understanding the intention of the imagery is the inclusion of original accompanying text attached to the reverse, revealing stories of the bizarre and the erotic, alongside Myth and Credo.

Girl Plays With Snake

Strand, Clare

Takashi Homma uses fragments collected in camera obscura constructed in metropolitan areas of Japan and the US to build a city image by image. Homma does not seek to index any particular city but to render a shadow world, a city's unconscious caught in a dark chamber, suspended in the camera's box. The camera obscura offers a repetition, like the reflection shimmering in Narcissus's pool. The narcissistic city is a city transfixed upon its own image - a mirror city, laced with repetition (modular) and reflections (glass). A city looking at its reflection, a city caught in a dark chamber, a city observing its camera obscura inversion - flickering inside the camera's box.

The Narcissistic City

Takashi Homma

With Confabulations, Torbjørn Rødland presents a set of analogue photographs that subtly misrepresents broken memories and childhood fantasies. Confabulations distorts facts to get to truth. Fragmentation is neither rejected nor induced in this unitary approach, but seen as a starting point for new connections. Beneath a million silly memes Rødland is looking for new soul.

Confabulations

Torbjørn Rødland

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